


Half As Happy

by blithers



Category: New Girl
Genre: Cunnilingus, Established Relationship, F/M, Road Trips, Roleplay, Truth or Dare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:27:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't until later that night, when Jess is at the wheel again and Nick is nodding off in the passenger seat, just past the Texas border, that it occurs to Nick that this might be the beginning of the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half As Happy

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to my beta readers - htbthomas, kyrafic, and ghostcat. This story wouldn't be the same without you. Spoilers for the second season finale.

_Tulsa, Oklahoma_

Jess gets the call just outside of Tulsa, bare feet propped up on the dashboard and toes painted a dusky pink.

She's tapping her big toe up against the windshield, leaving a circular smudge on the inside of the glass, keeping beat with the music from one of the CDs he'd dredged up from a battered cardboard box in the trunk of the car. Her legs are smooth and pale and really, really distracting. He's even into the electric green shorts she has on, which she's paired with a back and white shirt with zig zags for some terrible reason. Who _does_ that? And why does it still look so good on her? (Also, she denies it, but Nick is pretty sure that Jess is wearing children's clothes, because nobody in their right mind would make shorts for an adult that tiny. How does anybody think that's enough fabric to cover a grown woman? How do her shorts even function as actual clothing in the real world?)

He reaches out to idly drag a finger up the bone of the shin closest to him, one hand still on the steering wheel. He can _touch_ Jess whenever he feels like it now. It freaks him out if he thinks too much about it, freaks him out in a good way, makes his thoughts spin off crazy and huge. His finger slides frictionless over bare skin. Her legs are slick with a light sheen of sweat.

Her toe pauses in midair. She squeezes her thighs a little closer together.

Jess's phone breaks out into the chorus of Fresh Prince's _Summertime_ from somewhere near the vicinity of her feet. She breathes in sharply and drags her eyes away from him, fumbling for the phone like her hands have oven mitts attached to them.

"Hi?"

Jess hums and makes a couple noises of agreement into the phone while Nick floors the gas to pass a semi and adjusts his pants to suavely deal with his current boner situation. He's been dealing with a perpetual hard-on for the last three weeks; he's getting good at it. Then Jess exclaims, "Yes! Yes, I can do that, thank you!" and Nick's foot slips off the side of the pedal. The engine revs and slows at the sudden loss of fuel.

She blurts out "Yes!" a couple more times into the phone and twists her free hand up in the hem of her shirt. She shoots a couple of excited glances his way. Nick's not exactly sure what's going on yet, but anything that gets Jess going that much should be treated with extreme caution.

"I'll see you then. Thank you again!" Jess says, and finally ( _finally_ ) hits the end button on the call.

"What --"

"Theywantmetoteachsummerschool! The school I subbed at a couple weeks ago, they had a teacher drop out of one of their summer school classes, and they're offering the job to me. And they said it might even lead to me getting hired on full-time for the fall, if I do a good job. I can be a teacher again, Nick. A teacher. A teacher of _children_."

"Ye-ah!" He high fives Jess, then transitions to a low five with bonus finger wiggle. She's laughing, cheeks flushed up pink and happy. "So when do you start?"

Her smile slips a little. "Monday."

"Next Monday? ...Three days from now Monday?"

Jess nods, and Nick looks at his empty wrist like he has ever, in his life, worn a wristwatch. Watches are for chumps who have to be somewhere on time. Everybody knows that. "Well, I guess we better turn this rust bucket around."

Jess digs up the ukulele from the back and starts penciling out the lyrics to a song called First Day of Summer School (It's The Best Day of the Year!). Nick rants about boy bands for a while, just to get that one off his chest, and they spend an hour arguing about the radio selection in the middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma as they lose the Tulsa stations and drift back into the plains.

It isn't until later that night, when Jess is at the wheel again and Nick is nodding off in the passenger seat, just past the Texas border, that it occurs to Nick that this might be the beginning of the end.

\---

_Los Angeles, California, 3 days later_

Winston and Schmidt greet them at the door with crossed arms and a matching set of frowns.

"Well. Well. _Well_." Schmidt enunciates the words with relish. "What have we here, Winston?"

"I don't know, Schmidt. Looks like something the cat dragged in."

Nick throws his Transformers backpack from the Goodwill in San Bernardino on the ground and rolls his shoulders. They've been on the road for an obscene number of hours straight to make it back in time, trading shifts and sleeping in the backseat. Nick knows that half of his hair is currently smashed flat and the other half is stalwartly and magnificently rising to the challenge of giving the finger to the man, if the man happened to be gravity. Jess is as ragged as he's ever seen her, bangs plastered flat against her forehead and dark smudges under her eyes.

"I am not in the mood for this right now, guys." Nick kicks the backpack into the corner for good measure. Take that, Megatron.

"I will cut a bitch who gets in my way to the shower," Jess mutters.

Winston and Schmidt glare at them for another half-second before Schmidt breaks into blindingly white smile and Winston pulls out an aww-shucks grin. "Nah, man, we're just messin' with you," Winston says, and pulls a plate of cookies out from behind his back. "Welcome home!"

"Nicholas," Schmidt says fondly, dropping the act, and kisses him hard and fast.

"Damn it, Schmidt." Nick wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Really, you'd think he'd see it coming by now. "We've talked about this."

"Every single time," Schmidt agrees cheerfully. "And Jessica. You've let Nick's grunge lifestyle rub off on you, I see."

"If that's a crack about my hair, that is not cool, Schmidt."

Schmidt goes in for a hug and smoothly tucks some flyaways behind Jess's ear in the process. "It's Little House on the Prairie chic," he soothes, patting everything down in the guise of friendship.

Winston grasps Nick's forearm in one of the manliest handshakes Nick's ever had the pleasure to be a part of. "It's good you're back," Winston says softly.

"Yeah, man," Nick agrees. He's not sure he wants to be back, honestly, but that's not something he can say right now.

Winston turns to Jess and holds the plate of cookies out towards her with both hands. "We made cookies for you."

Jess claps her hands in front of her. "Winston," she says, in a choked-up voice. "How did you know?"

"Dude. It was pretty obvious. You sent us an entire series of postcards from the road with chocolate chip cookie recipe variations you wanted to try but couldn't." Winston nudges the cookies a little closer to Jess. "Postcard number 4, with macadamia nuts."

"Maca-maca-what," Schmidt raps, then mimes shooting a basketball. "Nuts, son!"

"You _guys_ ," Jess says, and beams at Winston and Schmidt. "You're the best friends a girl could ask for."

"Uh, boyfriend standing right here." Nick points at his face in a helpful circular motion.

Schmidt makes a face and Winston muffles a sharp laugh. "What?" Nick asks suspiciously.

"Sorry, man," Winston says. "We're cool with you and Jess now, honest. It's just that it's gonna take awhile to get used to hearing that one."

"Nick's her _booooy-friend_." Schmidt flutters his hand under his chin.

Nick scowls. "Shut up, Schmidty, or I'll boyfriend you." He closes his eyes. "…That did not come out right."

Schmidt laughs, grinning with delight.

Jess takes a bite of a cookie, and her eyes light up. "You guys, get out of here! These are _so good_!"

Winston and Schmidt just stand there and look smug, the bastards.

\---

Jess splits for the shower after giving everybody high fives ("Loft high five!" she narrates/sings in a weird falsetto, like that's a thing they've always done). As soon as she's gone, Nick starts throwing some significant eye contact Schmidt's way, who gets a cagey look and splits for his room. Winston shakes his head at Schmidt's retreating back.

"So how's Schmidt doing?" Nick asks, moving to the kitchen to crack open a cold one from the fridge. Civilization, a thing of beauty forever. Nick rubs his thumb down the condensation on the side of the can, smearing the cold droplets.

"Still in the I-choose-me-and-run-out-the-room stage. Say Cece or Elizabeth's name and the man stammers out something about free will and flees the building like he just saw a ghost."

"This I gotta see," Nick says, taking a long swig of his beer. "Hey, Schmidt!"

Schmidt pokes his head out of his room. "I realize you just got back from the boondocks, Nicholas, but I am not _on call_. Use your indoor voice."

"Sorry, Mom. Or should I say…" Nick narrows his eyes, " _Cece_?"

Winston hooks a foot around the leg of the stool. "I don't know, Nick. I was thinking _Elizabeth_."

Schmidt's jaw drops, and he works it open and shut a couple times before swiveling to glare at Winston. "Winston, you traitor," he hisses. "I choose me! It's a valid choice! Down with the system!" He spins around and makes a break for it.

"IT'S NOT FIGHTING THE MAN IF YOU'RE JUST BEING A DOUCHE," Winston yells as Schmidt slams the door to his bedroom shut.

Nick chuckles. "So that's a thing."

"Yes it is," Winston agrees cheerfully.

"What's a thing?" Jess asks, toweling her hair. She's changed into a pair of men's pajamas with blue piping and tiny ribbons where cufflinks would be.

"Schmidt is scared of Cece and Elizabeth."

Jess purses her lips and wrings out her curls. "He should be." She stifles a yawn with the back of her hand. "You know I'd love to stay up and get all the dirt on Schmidt, but I think I'm going to fall asleep standing here. And I have work tomorrow morning." Jess starts to grin as she says the words, and repeats, a little slower, "…I have _work_ tomorrow morning."

"Get it, girl!" Winston says, and throws a congratulatory fist bump Jess's way as he heads out.

…Which leaves the two of them, in the apartment together, alone, for the first time since they uncalled it.

Nick clears his throat. "Bed?" he asks, trying to sound casual, because he's working with a couple key facts here: a) they haven't had sex since somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, minus one frantic blow job/reciprocal orgasm on the long and exhausting trek home, b) the only time they've slept together in this apartment (in his _bed_ ) was the first time they had sex, and c) he is definitely going to be attracted to old man pajamas from here on out.

"Actually," Jess says slowly, "I was thinking I might sleep in my room tonight."

Nick finishes off his beer with one last, long pull. "I'm down with that."

"No, I mean… _I_ might sleep in _my_ room tonight."

He squints at her suspiciously, and Jess sighs, rubbing a hand over her eyes.

"It's just, I have to get up really early for work tomorrow, and I'm exhausted right now, and I really want to do a good job tomorrow, and…"

 _Oh_.

Right.

Nick makes himself laugh, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach. The last few weeks, the two of them in a car, sex blurring together with the heat of the road and a hundred anonymous variations on Small Town, America - it's already falling away, leaving the two of them, awkward and apart, standing in the kitchen of the loft like they'd never left in the first place.

"It's cool," he hears himself say, "I didn't actually think you would -"

"It's not that," she says quickly. "I just… I have to wake up so early tomorrow, and I want to do a good job, and -"

"It’s okay, Jess. It’s tooootally okay." He stands up, and makes himself kiss her, light and fleeting. "Get some sleep, kid. Go!"

She closes her eyes and sways into his body for a split-second, and then she turns.

He watches her until the door to her room closes in the hallway.

\---

Jess is gone by the time he wakes up the next morning. Nick kills time until the bar opens, sitting alone in the kitchen and scowling at his orange juice (and people think he doesn't take care of himself, ha, _take that, world_ ), before swinging by to put himself back on the schedule. Shane busts his balls for the whole cut-and-run act he pulled, but it isn't nearly as bad as he's expecting, so when Jess texts that she's hanging out with Cece after work he sticks around to drink with Big Bob for a while and ends up being recruited to make froofy drinks for a rowdy and highly penis-motivated bachelorette party in the back.

It isn't how he thought his first day back in LA would go.

Nick dishes out equal parts fruit juice and hard alcohol until close. He stumbles into the dark apartment and strips inelegantly on his way to the bed, leaving clothes strewn across the floor and nearly biting it trying to shake off the bottom of his jeans. He's about to fall, gunned-down desperado-style, arms spread wide, into bed when his comforter shifts and he belatedly realizes that somebody's already there, curled up in a pile of blankets.

"Jess?" he whisper-yells.

Jess squints up at him, hair in a glorious tangle around her face and eyes dark like the world's sexiest raccoon. "Nick?"

"Uh, _yeah_. You're in my room, dummy."

"Shut up, I know it's your room," she mutters.

"I didn't think…" he starts to say, then clamps his mouth shut hard.

Jess is quiet. "Is this okay?" she asks finally, sounding a little unsure, and Nick wants to kick himself. He dives into the covers next to her instead, bouncing the mattress and grabbing at her body with King Kong arms. She shrieks and giggles, kicking at the blanket cocooned around her bare legs.

"Shh," he scolds dramatically, and fights to put a hand over her mouth. Jess squirms away, attempting a strategic retreat into the relative safety of the bedspread.

He's laughing too now, a manly sort of laugh that he's pretty sure most people would _not_ call giggling. He wiggles his way underneath the blanket with her, sliding his legs next to hers. His hand brushes her boobs and comes across what is most definitely a nipple underneath her pajamas, and Nick is suddenly, acutely aware that he is now mostly naked and curled up next to his girl, on his bed.

He slides a hand down the curve of her hip, bumping against the waist of her cotton pajamas.

"Hey," she says, her voice throaty and shy, and he wonders if she's just had the same realization.

"Hey." 

"I missed you today," she says, and his heart knocks loudly and warmly in his chest.

"What, seventh grade boys not doin' it for you?" Sexual maturity for the win!

Jess huffs out an angry breath and flops over onto her back, staring at the ceiling. "They're just so… so… summer school is hard, Nick. It's like somebody assembled a superhero team made up of the world's greatest juvenile delinquents."

"No need to explain that to me. I used to be one of those punks. Seventh grade boys are the actual _worst_ , Jess."

\---

_Chicago, Illinois, 18 years earlier_

Nick drops to his knees, shaking an adolescent fist at the tree, festooned with shredded white ribbons of toilet paper. "I'll get you, you damn kids!"

\---

"…True fact," Nick confirms.

Jess rolls into his body, curling up against his side and rubbing a little against his thigh. "I'm sure they're all good kids, at heart," she sighs, like there was ever a possibility she wouldn't think the best of a bunch of teenagers who had been to condemned to the middle school version of a chain gang.

Nick slides his hand back up the curve of her hip, dragging his thumb over the line of her stomach. "Sure," he agrees.

"I mean it."

"I know you do," he says, and dips a finger underneath the band of her pajama pants, tracing the bare skin. Jess's breath hitches in his ear, tucked up against him with her chin on his shoulder. "How's Cece doing?"

Jess slips a thumb under the elastic of his underwear and tugs at the stretch of his waistband, running her finger back and forth, mirroring his motions. "I don't know." Jess is quiet. "I think… she's sad, I guess. I thought she'd be angry, but I think she's mostly sad."

"Oh," he says.

Nick's got some serious boner mojo working by this point, so he distracts himself tracing the dip of her stomach, fingers moving underneath the elastic of her pajamas. Her hair is spread out loose against the pillow, inky black curls against pedestrian plaid.

"I missed you too," he says, and is immediately weirded out by how serious that sentence sounded.

Jess looks mildly surprised and then starts to smile. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," he repeats softly, before he can bite it back.

He starts to unbutton the top of her pajamas, working his way up to bare her stomach and the little satin bow of her bra. She lifts her hips as they both work to kick her pajama pants off. Her naked legs are smooth and warm, rubbing against his own.

They spend a while just kissing, making out for the hell of it. Jess's mouth tastes sweet and clean, like mint and toothpaste. He feels a little bad about rocking the bar breath, but she doesn't seem to notice or mind, so maybe it isn't as dire as he thinks. He starts to stroke the band of her bra, the lacy bits rough under his fingers. She arches her back to give him access to the clasp, which pushes her boobs up in his face. He nips at the top of a breast and she shrieks, smacking him on his shoulder, her smile wide.

He starts to angle downward with the kissing, biting his way down the column of her throat. He stops, just below her belly button, and paints a sideways figure eight on her skin with his tongue. Jess squirms, her knees falling apart, and _Jesus_ , the way she responds to him is fucking amazing. He's always been pretty good at this, has always enjoyed getting women off with his tongue and fingers, but either he's playing on an entirely different level with Jess or she is just _ridiculously_ into it. It's hotter than he ever imagined, and this is something he used to imagine a _lot_.

She's still wearing underwear, cute little boy shorts with a bow in front that match the bra she's not wearing anymore. It occurs to him that he's about to be introduced first hand to Jess's entire non-thrifted wardrobe of lady's intimates. He's seen them around, bras laid flat to dry by the washer, the neat stacks of panties when she's folding laundry on her bed, but he's never been up close and personal with the lot.

"Did I ever tell you," he says, and runs the tip of his nose deliberately up the crotch of her underwear, "that I had a thing for that stupidly short skirt you always wore? The black one?" Jess smells faintly musky and sour and sweet, like sex trapped behind the steamed-up windows of a car. The thought makes him harder than he already is, his dick trapped under his body against the sheets of the bed. He presses into the mattress with his hips thoughtlessly, rubbing in little circles, unable to stop himself.

Jess hesitates, then shakes her head no, biting her lip. "You liked it?"

"Yeah," he says. "I always did."

He peels her panties off her body with her help, tossing them in the general direction of her bra, leaving Jess topless and bottoms-less and splayed out in front of him, her knees up around his ears. He licks a wide swath up the folds of her vagina, keeping his tongue flat. He can feel her toes curl into different shapes against the muscles of his back. He presses a grin into her thigh at that, where she can't see it, and opens her up with his fingers and finds her clit for the first time with the tip of his tongue.

She comes against his mouth, gasping his name.

"Nick," she pants, a couple long seconds later, "Nick, if you don't get up here, I swear to God."

"You swear what?" he manages to ask.

"Don't sass me, Miller," she says. He muffles a laugh against her stomach.

He works his way back up her body and latches his mouth, slick with arousal and _Jess_ , on her right breast. He tongues her nipple, springy between his lips, and mock-growls against it. He expects Jess to laugh, but she moans instead. She _moans_ with this broken little catch in her voice, and _fuck_. He jumps ship to the left side out of sheer stubbornness and lowers his free hand to his dick, pumping himself against the bed, her left nipple in his mouth, saliva from his lips smearing on her breast.

She pulls him up beside her, manhandling him where she wants him, and grabs a condom from the side of his bed. Then she rolls her body away from him and backs her ass up into his groin and _oh_ , that's where they're going with this one.

"Like this," she says, and reaches a hand back behind her and grabs his cock, yanking it into the small of her back. He hooks a hand in front of her body, then, and she throws a leg back over his hip. He slides up into her, hot and slick, _fuck_ , and feels something that's been knotted up inside of him since they walked back in the door to the loft relax and start to slowly unwind.

Nick bows his head and presses his forehead into the back of Jess's neck as she rocks against him. Her hair is everywhere, sticking to his nose and mouth like a perfumed cloud of static electricity. He loops an arm in front of her, hooking a forearm under one boob and grasping hold of the bottom one. Her breast is still wet from his mouth, the weight and heft of it unexpectedly slippery and glossy underneath his fingertips.

He yanks her back hard against his chest, using her breasts as leverage, and both of them gasp.

Jess gets herself off the second time with him moving inside of her, her fingers pressed against her own clit, biting her lower lip between her teeth. Nick fucks up into her, her body shuddering against him and his hand slipping on the saliva smeared on her breasts. When he comes it's like a freight train, and he clamps down on the back of her neck with his teeth harder than he means to, the familiar smell of his own sheets around him.

She wears her hair down around her shoulders the next day. When she smiles at him, it's like a secret.

\---

_Amarillo, Texas, 2 weeks earlier_

Texas is flat and dry and a sort of yellowish brown color. The heat makes the lines of the road dance and shimmer, miles of empty, sweltering blacktop stretched out in front of them. It's the most Nick has ever felt like a cowboy, or maybe James Dean, and it is fucking fantastic.

They buy a three pack of sparklers at a roadside stand and follow a dirt road to get away from the highway, parking at the edge of a vast field of dead grass. There's still sunlight, though, so they sit on the hood of Jess's car and pass a bottle of warm beer back and forth while the sun sets in front of them, melting the horizon into a molten puddle of red and gold. The sparklers smell like gunpowder and sulfur, shedding white-hot bits of starlight on the ground. Jess twirls hers like a halo over her head. Nick sets up a domino's course of sparklers on the ground, crisscrossing them so they light the next in line as the fuses burn down. 

"Hey, look," Jess says, and spins a sparkler from the ground up to waist height in a circle. The afterimage forms a spiral around her bare summer legs, like one of those big old fashioned hoop skirts. "I'm my own fairy godmother."

Nick frowns.

"Cinderella," Jess clarifies.

"Is that the one with the mice who wear clothing?"

"Shirts and a hat, no pants."

"Living the good life." His last sparkler burns out with a disappointing final sputter. "Hey, can you throw me another one?"

Jess tosses him an unopened pack and a book of matches, then lights a new sparkler for herself and starts to trace their initials against the rapidly blackening sky.

"See," she says, finishing the motion with an ornate flourish, "it's J + N with a big heart around it, like you'd carve into a tree."

Nick writes something in cursive against the sky. He can see the beginning of stars starting to show, dim specks of white light dotting the dark blue night.

"What'd you write?" Jess asks, smiling over at him. She looks incandescent and wild, lit only by the glow of the sparkler. Her hair is dark and curly and her eyes are an unearthly shade, like ice frozen thick across a lake in the middle of winter. The light lingers on the bones of her face and accentuates the red of her lips, throwing unexpected shadows across the lines of her features. She looks unknowable and untouchable, like words on a page that Nick can trace with his fingers but never understand, and Nick wonders how long it's going to be until Jess realizes she's made a mistake.

"Nothing interesting," he lies.

\---

The entire first week of classes is bad for Jess. She holes herself up in the kitchen Friday evening after she gets home and starts in on some hardcore stress baking, cracking eggs with ruthless efficiency and scowling, hands on her aproned hips, at the shelf for baking supplies she'd won in an early land war with Schmidt.

"We're looking at a vanilla, chocolate, and red velvet situation," Schmidt informs him darkly, cornering him in the bathroom. "You need to get your woman under control, Miller. My thighs cannot afford to be force fed more of Jess's emotional problems. I'm barely squeezing into my slim fit cords as is."

Nick crosses his arms over his chest. "Then don't wear corduroy, Schmidt. We've discussed this. You are not a 60 year old English professor who smokes a pipe."

Schmidt flashes him a sudden, brilliant smile. "Crushed cords, crushing life, my man. Everybody knows that."

"That isn't -"

"Did somebody say red velvet?" Winston saunters in with a plastic shower bin and a white towel wrapped high around his head. "Fluffy little clouds of confectionary heaven, am I right?"

"You know we only get to red velvet once Jess blows past chocolate and vanilla," Schmidt snaps. "This is not a joking matter, Winston."

Winston throws his head back regally, lips pressed together. "I don't _joke_ about red velvet, Schmidt."

"Guys," Nick says, holding up his hands, "I say we just get out of her way and let her bake us some damn cupcakes."

Schmidt scowls and leans in close to Nick's face. "All… on… _you_."

Winston shakes his head. "Man needs to eat a cupcake and take it down a notch."

\---

To Nick's surprise, Jess is still at it when he comes home that night. She's hunched over the kitchen island, tongue between her teeth and a bag of frosting in her fist, piping icing with furious concentration. There's a single light on, throwing the rest of the kitchen into shadow, and a minefield of half-decorated cupcakes strewn about her. It's kind of sinister, like a black and white horror movie about a science experiment that can only be done in the middle of a thunderstorm and ends up going horribly, horribly wrong.

"Hey," he says cautiously.

She looks up from icing a beaten-down cupcake.

"Cupcake trouble?"

She scowls down at the counter. "My first batch didn't rise. I had to throw everything out and start again."

Nick moves past her, heading for the cabinets. "That sucks. You want a drink? There's some whiskey that Schmidt's been trying to hide in the back of the liquor cabinet. I mean, who _hides_ something in the place it's supposed to be? What an idiot. You know I can't let a stunt like that stand." Alcohol solves all problems: this is something Nick knows deep in his bones. It's his heritage, his superhero origin story, a fundamental truth of the Miller family.

"Yeah, sure," she says, watching him. "I guess so."

The whiskey is shoved back behind a half-empty bottle of schnapps. Nick takes a slug (it's the good stuff too, top shelf, way to go, Schmidty) and hands it off to Jess. She follows his lead, taking the shot straight, wrapping her lips around the neck of the bottle. The long muscles of her throat work as she swallows, head tipped back. It's ridiculously, stupidly hot. It's like something out of a porno Schmidt would be into, about classy women going down on bottles of pretentiously overpriced alcohol.

His collar feels itchy and constrictive. He slips the first two buttons of his shirt.

She hands the whiskey back to him, looking pleased with herself. Her tongue darts out to lick the corner of her lips, and it's only then she starts to cough, sucking in air through her nose in an attempt to soften the burn of the alcohol. He slaps her on the back.

"Okay there, champ?"

She straightens up, wiping her eyes. "Never better. Did you just call me _champ_?"

"Uh, is that not a thing we're doing? I could go with slugger, if that's more your speed. Sport? How do you feel about sport?"

"How about none of those?"

"Slugger it is," Nick agrees magnanimously.

She snags the whiskey from him again. The tips of her fingers brush against his when he hands the bottle over. "What do I call you, then?"

Nick goes for a leer. "The best sex of your life?" It's a long shot, but he's gonna take it.

She wrinkles her nose, smiling, and takes another shot. "What about… a hunk-a-hunk of burning love?"

He reclaims the bottle as she's laughing, taking a long, blatant swallow of the stuff. "I'm surprisingly cool with that. Even if that does make me sound like I have the clap. Well done, slugger."

Jess makes a circle with her fingers and brings it up to her eye, assuming the eager expression she gets when Jess Does A Character. "Pip pip, old sport," she chirps.

He points a finger at her. "No."

"Whut whut -"

"No."

"Don't be such a fuddy duddy, Nick Miller," she says, still doing the the finger-monocle thing, but her voice is starting to drift dangerously into Daffy Duck territory.

"Oh my God," he says, and pokes her side. She huffs a laugh and launches into a full-on Daffy monologue, growing increasingly animated, which is the sort of thing that Nick Miller, as a semi-responsible citizen of the planet Earth, has a moral obligation to put a stop to.

He leans down and presses his lips up against hers, cutting her off in mid-cartoon laugh. He sneaks a hand around her waist. Jess's wardrobe has taken a hard turn into skirts and dresses that look like they previously belonged to a milkmaid in Switzerland in the week they've been home. He's never dated a girl who's worn skirts so much. He is definitely developing an unnervingly erotic fixation on the skirt as a basic clothing choice.

She tastes like oak smoke and chocolate. Nick drags his teeth along the swell of her lower lip, tugging at it gently as he pulls away.

"Okay?" he whispers.

She breathes in all at once, unsteadily. "Yeah," she says, just as quietly. "Okay."

"Kids can be jerks. You know that. Don't let the bastards get you down."

Jess presses her lips together and nods.

"And cupcakes are even bigger assholes," he continues, warming up to it. "What, do they think they're too good to be part of a regular cake? Like, ooh, I'm so much better than a normal slice of cake, look at me with my fancy wrapper and judge-y single serving size." He scoffs. "Idiots."

Her eyes widen. "Shut your mouth, cupcakes are amazing!"

"Shut _your_ mouth," he retorts. It's not his finest moment, as comebacks go.

"You know you like my cupcakes," she says in a low voice, like that statement is somehow also a threat. "You _know_ you do. EVERYBODY LIKES MY CUPCAKES, NICK."

"WHY DOES THAT SOUND SO DIRTY," he yells, balling up his fists.

Jess is breathing hard in front of him, her nose practically touching his. "I DON'T KNOW!"

"AND WHY ARE WE YELLING AT EACH OTHER?"

"I was just going to ask the same question," a new voice says, and Nick looks up mid-rant at Winston, arms crossed judgmentally over his bare chest.

Jess takes a deep, sharp breath. "Don't you -"

The door to Schmidt's bedroom opens and his head sticks out, hair poofed up like an electrocuted chipmunk. "Are we not doing this? I'm pretty sure we were _this close_ to sex in the kitchen."

Jess puffs up even larger, which is something Nick hadn't realized was physically possible at this point. " _Schmidt_ ," she hisses.

"Please. Like we haven't all climbed that particular mountain at one point or another. Who do you think sanitizes the counters in the morning?"

"I am _not_ having this conversation with you, Schmidt," Jess says, and whirls back around to grab a cupcake and slap some frosting down on it, like adequate chocolate coverage is the only solution to having three male roommates all up in her business. Nick takes a step back from her, adjusting his hard-on up under the band of his pants in a motion he hopes looks casual and smooth, but fears only looks like a dude who gets off on arguing with his girlfriend.

Winston brightens, scratching at his naked shoulder. "Cupcakes?" he asks hopefully, drifting in a little closer to the kitchen island.

Jess pushes the baking tin in his direction without looking up. "You want 'em, you frost 'em."

"Nicholas Miller, is that the _good whiskey_?"

Nick considers the rather incriminating evidence dangling from his fingertips. "…No?" he tries, and raises the bottle to take another shot.

"If that's a potshot at a small batch, hand-barrelled, five year old American-made whiskey of the _gods_ , I won't hear it, Nicholas."

"Nah," Nick says. "This is the good stuff. You did good, Schmidty."

Schmidt tilts his head to the side, starts to smile, and scowls fiercely again. "Flattery will get you nowhere," he snaps, and grabs the bottle back from Nick.

"Hey, Nick, do you want to help here?" Jess asks, sounding considerably calmer with a butter knife in one hand and Winston at her side.

Nick helps frost an obscene number of cupcakes, doing his part in the assembly line they've created out of their limited working parts, with Schmidt as the final stop for quality control and sprinkles. Jess starts to sing old show tunes halfway through, and since Winston knows all the words to the songs in West Side Story they start in on a small scale Sharks/Jets rivalry, with Schmidt occasionally throwing down on the chorus and Nick getting recruited to Jess's side in the gang war ( _snap your fingers and look threatening, leave the dancing to me_ , she whispers). 

They wrap things up at three in the morning, after sorting cupcakes into tupperware labeled with their final destinations (Jess's class, the teacher's lounge, Schmidt's office, the obligatory tribute for Remy, loft supply). Jess starts to do the dishes, exhaustion etched in the lines around her eyes.

"Hey, Jess, leave it," Nick says, and puts a hand on her shoulder. "We'll do them in the morning."

"I don't -" she starts to say, reaching underneath the sink for the dish soap.

Nick rolls his eyes, wraps an arm around her waist, and throws her up over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Jess squirms, ass tilted up in the air over his shoulder, and hits the muscles of his back a couple times with dull fists. "Hey! Nick Miller, you put me down _right now_!" It's her scary teacher voice, ringing with an authority he's not used to hearing from her.

"Kinky," says Schmidt. "Been blasting your pecs for that one?"

Nick adjusts his hold on the back of Jess's bare thighs and walks her out of the kitchen before turning and giving his boys a nod, a manly little jerk of his head. "Gentlemen."

"I don't even want to know," says Winston, sucking on chocolate-smeared fingers.

Schmidt grins. "You crazy kids have fun."

"Oh my GOD," Jess exclaims, and kicks her heels up a couple more times.

"We'll do the damn dishes in the morning!" he snaps back at her, over his shoulder.

Jess wiggles against his shoulder the whole way to her room, so he digs his fingers into her legs to keep her anchored. He swerves into Jess's room, maneuvers both of them safely through the doorframe, and tosses her in the middle of the bed. She bounces on the mattress a couple times before settling, looking up at him from her back with something like shock. He can see dull red ovals on her thighs, where his hands had been.

There's a long moment where they don't say anything to each other. Then Jess comes up on her knees on the bed, bringing her almost even with him in height, and reaches out to grab his belt, yanking his hips with sudden violence closer to the mattress. He stumbles a little.

"Jess - " he starts to say.

"Shut up," she says. "I've had a bad week, and I just had a really good time making cupcakes, and you're most of the reason why, so just shut up, Nick."

She starts to unbuckle his belt, leaving the ends hanging from the first loops in his jeans, and unzips his pants. She pulls out his dick without much fanfare - he's half-hard, but Jess's hands on him are making short work of any self-control he might have had left.

She swings her legs around on the bed and slides to her knees in front of him.

\---

He makes her a themed set of commute mix CDs for her new job - mornings, evenings, Fridays, Flashback to the 90s with Nick Miller!, and a fifth one where Schmidt and Winston co-DJ in a battle of the bands death cage match, loft-style. He steals some of Jess's ribbon to tie them all together and presents them to her with a flourish where he awkwardly pulls them out from behind his back and says "Tadah!" Jess loves them. (Jess was never _not_ going to love them, though.)

Jess pulls him up to the roof with her that evening, wearing her short black skirt, sans tights, and a purple sweater. Once they're there, she locks the door to the stairwell and flashes him her underwear, red with little white hearts, looking super pleased with herself. He fucks her up against a wall, both of them fully clothed, until the brick turns out to be a bit much. She pushes him flat on a lawn chair, her hand on his chest, and finishes them both off. They curl up together after that, managing to fit themselves together comfortably in the tight space after weeks of training for the gold medal in this event on the road.

They fall asleep until the cold and the morning dew wakes them up and forces them back downstairs.

\---

Daisy breaks up with Winston on a Thursday.

It's not a surprise - they've all known the writing was on the wall for a while now - but Winston still takes it hard. He retreats into his bedroom, and sulks when Nick busts in with a couple slices of pepperoni pizza on a paper plate. Schmidt tries to coax him out with a new pair of lightweight merino socks in a subtle cross hatched blue, while Jess composes a song for Winston, something about rainbows on the other side, and strong arms Schmidt and Nick into harmonizing awkwardly on the backup vocals and jazz-handing the final chorus.

Winston shows up by himself at the bar later that week and tells Nick to hit him with the good stuff, so Nick digs out the plastic pirate swords, carves up a whole pineapple from scratch, and sends out one of the new guys on staff for some tropical-looking girly flowers. The result is a damn masterpiece. The people around Winston applaud when Nick unveils it dramatically with a dish cloth, and Winston smiles for the first time since the whole Daisy thing went down.

Winston's still perched on the same stool at closing time, making faces at a somewhat less souped-up pina colada made with more sugar than alcohol (Nick has been cutting the proportions back with every round). Nick slaps a bar towel down in front of him in a not-so-subtle reminder that some of them want to leave the warm embrace of the bar at some point in their sad lives.

"Doing okay, man?"

Winston makes a choked sort of noise that Nick is stalwartly thinking of as Not Crying. "Yeah," Winston finally manages to sniffle out.

Nick frowns and rubs a slow figure eight on the bar with the towel. "Is this the thing where too much sugar makes you sad?"

Winston straightens up enough to give him a scathing look. "Dude, that only happened _once_. And I was seven." He pauses, before jabbing a finger in Nick's direction. "And it had been a VERY stressful Halloween."

\---

_Chicago, Illinois, 24 years earlier_

"Mooooom," Nick yells down the staircase, jabbing his plastic lightsaber at the bannister a couple times, "Winston is crying _again_. Tell Winston he's not allowed to cry when he's being Darth Vader!"

\---

"You kept making me say "I'm your father, Luke," after my dad _walked out on us_ , Nick."

"Oh, boohoo, little Winnie's got daddy issues. Join the club, dude. YOU MAN UP FOR STAR WARS."

"I was _seven_! And you weren't so into Star Wars the next year, anyway."

\---

_Chicago, Illinois, 23 years earlier_

"Allison Daniels says that Chewbacca is stupid," Nick mutters, kicking at the base of his bed with furry feet. Winston adjusts his Han Solo vest, spins his blaster pistol, and smoothly holsters it with a panache that Nick admires to the depth of his soul. "I _hate_ Star Wars."

\---

Nick slings the towel over his shoulder. "It's just… I didn't think Daisy meant this much to you."

Winston pokes around at the bottom of his glass with the thin pink straw. "She didn't," he says finally.

"Then what's the deal, man?"

"Daisy was…" Winston shakes his head. "She was funny, she was sexy… and she _liked_ me, you know? Sure, scheduling time to see her was terrible. But after her, and Shelby…" His voice is drifting off again, getting quieter. "Maybe there's nobody out there for me, Nick. Maybe all life holds for Winston Bishop is a second rate post-ball career and a girlfriend once a year who isn't really that into me."

Nick slaps Winston, flat handed, right across his stupid, stupid face.

Winston jumps back, sputtering, and instantly slaps Nick back. God damn athlete reflexes. "What the _hell_ , dude?"

"Snap out of it!" Nick yells, then pauses to work his jaw, rubbing at his cheek. "So you broke up with your stupidly hot girlfriend after having lots of sex with her. It's Darth Vader all over again. You get to be the most badass dude in the galaxy and all you can see is what you don't have."

"Once again, Nick, my father had _left us_."

"Don't try to fluster me with your," Nick goes for the extra large air quotes, " _logical reasons_ for," air quotes again, " _behaving like a human being_. You're the luckiest guy I know. You were good enough to play basketball _in another country_. That blows my mind, man. And Daisy was smoking hot, and really into you. Like, kind of uncomfortably so. So what if it didn't work out? Every single relationship I've ever been in has ended badly."

"But you've got Jess now," Winston points out glumly, and picks out a drooping pink flower with white tiger stripes from his drink and sticks it behind his ear.

"I don't _have_ Jess."

"What's that mean?"

"It means, I don't _have_ Jess."

"You can't just repeat the same sentence again and think that makes any more sense!"

"It means what it means!" Nick's trying not to yell, really he's not, but damn, Winston is _thick_ sometimes.

Winston gives him a funny sort of look, one that makes the back of Nick's neck itch. "…You think that you and Jess aren't gonna make it," Winston says slowly, still staring at him like he has x-ray vision and a Superman shield underneath his t-shirt.

Nick shrugs. "It is what it is, man."

Winston's face is settling back into his normal look of somebody who can't believe the shit going down in front of his eyes. "Well, that's going to be fun," he says, sharp and sarcastic and sounding more like himself than he has in a solid week.

"I don't think it's not _not_ going to work," Nick says. "I'm just… I'm taking the time I get, you know?"

"Yeah, man." Winston pokes disconsolately at his drink. "We all are."

\---

_Albuquerque, New Mexico, 5 weeks earlier_

They've been sleeping in the backseat of the car for weeks, trading off with the occasional motel room when the rates are good, when the heat wave hits.

They try to car camp again that first night, but the novelty of bare skin sliding together, sweat-slick and urgent, wears off fast. Jess ends up sprawled across the center console in the front seat by herself, panting in her sleep. Nick drapes his feet out of the rolled-down windows in the back, staring at the ceiling of the car as insomnia hits hard, leaving him cranky and weirdly dizzy.

They come across a motel the next day with detached cabins and an actual pool, shimmering crystal blue like the sweetest mirage Nick has ever seen. It's an easy decision.

Jess disappears for a couple hours that afternoon, clutching a newspaper with garage sales circled in red ink, and returns triumphant with a plain white two piece for herself and a pair of swim trunks for him. Nick walks the half mile along the shoulder of the highway to the nearest liquor store and nets them bottles of cheap tequila and triple sec and a bag of sad looking limes. They have salt and sugar packets in the glove compartment and plastic cups in the trunk, so he makes the margaritas strong and gives Jess a sugar rim.

They swim long into the night, past pool close, trying to muffle their laughter. Jess's bikini stands out like it's glow in the dark, neon white in the eerie blue of the underwater lights, strings hugging the swell of her hips and her nipples hard from jumping in and out of the pool. Her hair is wet and flat and pulled back in a low ponytail. Jess looks younger with her hair back and her face scrubbed clean, like a girl Nick can imagine having had a crush on in high school.

She corners him up against the side of the pool, underneath the diving board, where the sound of the water slapping the tiled side of the pool echoes. Her mouth is warm and sour-sweet from alcohol. She laughs between kissing him, the sound soft and private.

He grabs the whole of her hip with the palm of his hand. She rocks up against his stomach, arms slung around his shoulders, and stifles giggles into his neck.

It's like something out of his damned fantasies, all those times he brought himself off in the shower, the smell of Jess's shampoo still lingering in the steam and the image of her legs, barely covered in that stupidly short towel, shiny with lotion after shaving. The way Jess can walk confidently in high heels, hips slinky with the height, the four extra inches putting her even with his height so that he used to fantasize about bending her over the back of the couch and fucking her sweet and simple, skirt hiked up around her waist and ass in the air from the spike of the heels. The way he used to think about her when he knew he shouldn't, the way he used to jack one off fast before falling asleep, imagining her naked and on top of him, the brief moment of orgasm leaving him feeling sticky and guilty.

Because she was his roommate.

Because she was _Jess_.

He lets his hand slip across her ass, tracing the triangle of the bikini fabric. He drags his fingernails along the cold curve of muscle. She shivers for the first time, her mouth a hot patch of warmth on his collarbone.

He nudges the fabric aside and slips a finger into her from behind, his hand tucked awkwardly into the back of her bikini, cupping the swell of her ass.

Jess gasps against his neck, the sound muted under the slap of the water and the gurgling sound of the pool filters.

He can't get it up in the water (it's _cold_ , man, what is he, a superhero?) so he gets Jess off with his fingers and the friction of her body against his stomach instead. It's the hottest thing he can think of, Jess moaning in his ear and the fear that somebody is going to walk by at any moment and catch them.

It's like something that happens in a movie.

\---

Jess is out with Cece a couple nights in a row, and since Jess is a working lady on the regular again, it means he only sees her in passing for a while. It's something he wouldn't have thought much about before, but now, it's just… weird. Like he's the stay-at-home boyfriend. He doesn't really understand why Jess is spending so much time with Cece anyway. Did Jess spend this much time with Cece before? He mulls that one over for a while and finally asks Schmidt, who stares at him like he's grown a third arm and gets on his case about washing his sheets, instead.

He gets a late text from Jess the next evening about having to help Cece drag Nadia home from some sort of model-orgy (at least, that's what Nick's gonna go with there), so he sprawls out on the couch to watch the Cubs game with a couple of cold ones. It's quiet in the apartment (Schmidt had strong-armed Winston out on some sort of bro-bonding single man mission). The silence is nice, but it also makes Nick feel itchy, like there's something he should be doing but can't quite remember.

He's contemplating the line-up of empties in front of him and the Cubs' current losing streak when Jess stumbles in, hours earlier than he was expecting.

"Nick Miller!" she crows, stopping at the door to fling her hands up in the air. "My boyfriend, Nick Miller, ladies and gentlemen!"

She throws herself down on the couch dramatically, her head ending up in his lap. She's glammed up with that crazy thick makeup and a pretty blue dress riding up high on her thighs as she sprawls. He brushes a bit of hair back from her face and grins down at her giddiness.

"Heeey, girlfriend," he drawls. "Have a good time?"

She smiles up at him and nods in answer, her face upside-down and sideways, with a bit of eye shadow smudged by her left eye. Nick licks his thumb and gets that all back into shape. Jess wrinkles her nose up at him.

"Ugh, did you just put spit on my face, Nick?"

"Nope, not a bit," he says, and she laughs. He's feeling the effects of seven innings worth of alcohol, but Jess is two sheets to the wind - she's a cheerful drunk by nature, color flushed high on her cheekbones. Her hair is crazy, fanned out around her head like a living mass of curls that's threatening to slowly engulf his crotch.

He uses his thumb to detach a few wisps of hair that are stuck to her mouth. She bites at the bottom of her lip when he touches her face.

Then she reaches for his hand, sucking two fingers into her mouth before he can react.

Her mouth is shockingly warm. He can feel her tongue, working at the gaps between his fingers, wet and rough against the skin. Jess scrapes her teeth over the swell of the second joint, pulling his fingers deeper into her mouth. She rolls her eyes up to stare at him through her thick lashes, lips pursed red around his fingers.

"Uh," he says. He's super impressed with himself that he has enough blood flow left to manage that stunner.

His fingers pop free of her lips with a wet smack.

"Jess," he says carefully, "you are _drunk_."

She holds up a hand for an upside-down high five. "Yeah, boy!"

He smiles down at her and returns the high five, then puts a hand on the curve of her waist in that crazy dress - whatever the fabric is, it's bunched up in thick, stretchy folds around her hips. She rubs her cheek against his thigh when he gets distracted by a guy on second making an abortive attempt to steal third.

"Hey, Nick?"

"Mmm?"

"Do you wanna know what I thought about tonight?"

He rubs his thumb up and down the concave dip of her waist, running it down the line of her body until it hits the bone of her hip and ping pongs. "Sure."

"I thought about that first time, in the car." Her cheek is laid flat against his thigh, facing the television, and her voice is dreamy and unfocused. "Down to dutch country. When you-" Her hips shift under his fingers, and she grinds her thighs together, and Jesus, he knows, he _knows_.

Jess reaches out for the remote on the coffee table and squints at it before turning the game off. The sudden silence feels thick in the loft. He can hear his own breathing, and the small noises Jess makes when she moves. She sits up and turns, swinging a leg around so she's straddling his lap.

She's taller than him like this. He has to tilt his chin to look up at her.

He clears his throat. "That's specific."

She nods.

"You wanna know what I thought about today?"

"Yeah."

"You," he says, and hopes she doesn't hear everything he's trying not to say underneath the word.

Her mouth collides with his in a mess of teeth and tongue, and Nick starts to crowd her up against his body with the flat of his hand. He's missed her these past couple days, he has _missed_ her. She bites the bottom of his lip hard enough to sting, going at his mouth with short, ungraceful kisses.

She breaks away from him, gasping. "Pretend like I'm one of your college girls, Nick."

He blinks hard, his brain trying to play catch up. "...What?"

"You know, when you slept with all those girls. Pretend like I'm one of them." Jess does that hair toss all girls do, the one that turns the weight and length of her hair into a pendulum to get it back behind her shoulders, and giggles at him. It's… weird. But maybe also hot? Definitely hot, but in that weird sort of way. "You just picked me up at some stupid party, and I'm kind of drunk and maybe a little slutty and you're just trying to get all up in it, son."

Nick smooths a hand up the side of her body, tracing curves. He's distractingly hard right now. All he can feel is the flex of Jess's legs and the weight of her body on his. "I don't know, Jess." He _likes_ the fact that she's not just some girl.

Her fingers are inching up under his shirt, touching bare skin. "C'mon, Nick."

He takes a sharp breath in. "Okay. Okay. But don't call sex _getting all up in it_ , Jessica. That is the opposite of a turn-on."

"Scout's honor."

"Good girl," he murmurs, and her eyes widen.

He brings his fingers back down the seam of her dress and tries to think. Jess is staring at him, her lips red and parted slightly, and he can see a flash of underwear between her legs, her dress rucked up high around her hips. He can barely breath, can barely make himself focus.

"What were you like in college?" he asks, trying to distract himself, rubbing his thumb in a slow arc just above her knee.

Jess furrows her brow, and licks her lips as she searches for the right answer. "Awkward," she says finally.

He kisses her then, trying to remember how he does this when the girl he's kissing isn't a sure thing. He lets his hands slide slowly up her bare leg, digging his fingernails into the skin just under the hem of her dress. She gasps softly.

"S'okay," he murmurs and slips his hand up a little higher, brushing the tips of his fingers against her panties. "We've got all the time in the world, sweetheart."

Her panties are tacky and damp. He can vaguely feel the damp spot at the head of his dick in his underwear, trapped underneath ten million layers of stupid clothing. He shifts his hips to try to get his erection settled in a better spot for the short term, but Jess takes the motion as permission, as the start of something. She grinds down onto his lap instead, and fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

He groans and puts both hands to her hips and rocks his erection experimentally up into her instead.

She tangles her hand in his hair, yanking him closer to her body, up close and personal with her boobs, and rubs herself up against him like a god damn cat. They're dry humping like teenagers on the couch, and it takes Nick a couple of dumb, blank minutes to realize that Jess might not realize that these aren't his moves, that he doesn't just rub himself all over girls like the worst sort of itch.

He grabs hold of the last shreds of his self-control and makes his hand move, through sheer force of will, back onto her leg.

He brings his thumb to his mouth then, licks it, and slips it under her skirt and the elastic of her panties. He presses the flat of his thumb against her clit and she arches up against him, trapping his hand between their bodies. Jess doesn't stop rocking. He can feel a shudder travel through her body. Her face is screwed up tight with the vaguely petulant look of concentration she gets when she's chasing an orgasm.

"Easy," he mumbles, and kisses her again, hanging tight to a thread of sanity, "easy, baby."

He lets the rest of his hand rub flat against her without penetration, his fingers slipping wetly against her vagina. He curls up two fingers then, hooking them in a come-hither gesture, and Jess rocks herself back onto his fingers without any other motion on his part. She gasps, her lips dropping into an open 'o' shape, red with old fashioned lipstick, and Jesus, she has a mouth made for blowjobs. He sticks his other thumb in her mouth without thinking about it, and her teeth scrape up against his knuckle like she'd done just a few minutes ago.

He bites the inside of his mouth hard when she comes to keep from blowing his load in his pants, thinks about Schmidt on nail trimming day and Winston skulking around the apartment in his horrifying green seaweed/avocado facial mask, which freaks Nick out on a fundamental level and, to add insult to injury, had tasted awful that one time Nick had been really drunk and tried some of it on a chip (for scientific drunk-person purposes).

He lets Jess ride it out, two fingers deep in her pussy, one hooked in her mouth.

He puts a hand at the base of her neck and _rolls_ them, pushing Jess back into the couch, stretching his body out on top of her.

"Yeah?" he breathes, having a vague memory of things like _words_ and _the English language_ and _this is how it goes with girls he hasn't fucked before_.

"Yeah," she says, "yeah, yeah, clothes off, clothes off," and pushes down his jeans and underwear. Her hands go still. "Condom. Forgot…"

"On it," he says, and plunges a hand back behind the couch cushion for the box wedged there. "Emergency couch condom stash."

Jess's mouth drops open. "Has that always been there?"

"Mmm. Schmidt stocks it." Nick one-hands a condom and rolls it on fast, then pauses a moment, gives himself an award for Best At Sex Stuff, and dives back in for the sample size lube. He gives Schmidt an honorary bro-award for Best At Planning Really Weird Stuff.

She's working at the elastic band of her underwear underneath him, caught under the bunched-up fabric of her dress. He pushes a hand down the naked side of her hip to help, hooking his fingers under the high cut of her panties, bunching the fabric up with his thumb and pushing it down her body.

Working together, they get everything down around her knees. Nick wedges a knee between her thighs. Jess is pawing at the back of his shoulders, panting in his ear. He pushes up into her, finally, _finally_ , his eyes rolling back, _Jesus_ , and she feels tight and hot and so fucking amazing it's a miracle he doesn't come off, right there.

He's barely inside her, just the head of his dick, really, and everything else caught between her thighs because her knees are only a couple inches apart. He thrusts, shallowly, and she wiggles desperately underneath him at the fabric still caught around her legs.

"Nick, you gotta…"

"Trying," he grunts, and shifts his knee between her legs, catching her panties behind it and pushing his body forward and his knee backward. The movement frees her thighs a couple more inches. The momentum also propels him up hard into her pelvic bone, so that he sinks inside of her a couple more inches, the base of his cock still between her legs and _aching_. All the air leaves his lungs at the sensation, his ribs collapsed tight around his heart.

He drops his head into her neck. " _Fuck_ , Jess."

"Yeah," she agrees, and wiggles her hips down another couple inches, finally snagging the waistband of her underwear with the arch of her foot. She works them off, then uses her foot to give him a bit of breathing room, pushing his jeans, flapping around his hips, down a little lower. She wraps her leg up around him and _pulls_ him into her.

He sinks his mouth into her collarbone, pressing his forehead into the couch cushion next to Jess's head.

"You're so good at this," she gasps, her voice gone high and kind of girly. It takes him a minute to process that.

He picks his head up enough to whisper in her ear. " _We're_ good at this, sweetheart."

Jess moans, low and in her throat. "C'mon," he starts to babble, starts to beg, hardly knowing what he's saying. "C'mon, baby, Jess, Jessica, sweetheart," and Jess gasps again, pupils blown out dark with alcohol and lust, her mouth hanging open. Nick is starting to overheat, trapped in the shirt he's still wearing, the heat making him stupid and dizzy. He bites his lip to hold out, concentrating on the sharp, painful feel of his lip snagged between his teeth, trying to hold on to any semblance of rational thought. But it turns out he's down for the count early tonight, and it's only coincidence that she gasps underneath him as his own orgasm crashes into him.

Nick groans and flexes his feet, then drops his head all close to Jess's, languor and bone-deep tiredness already seeping into his muscles. Jess kisses him for a second, sweetly, and then slugs him on the shoulder. "Off," she says, so Nick obediently rolls to his left and straight off the couch, onto his ass, jeans hanging around his knees and his dick flopping around in the breeze. Whoops.

Jess's head pops out into the air above him, eyes wide.

"Nick! Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he says, and lets his head fall back. The floor's really workin' for him right now.

Jess starts to laugh, loose and fucked-out, her hair a mess of sex and friction, her face red from the alcohol. "You just _disappeared_ ," she says. "It was like… poof!"

"Love 'em and leave 'em," he says, and apparently that's the thing, because she snorts and disappears from view again, and all he can hear after that is her delighted laughter.

\---

Schmidt bursts into the kitchen the next morning, eyes wild and clutching a handful of loose papers. "Loft announcement, loft announcement," he gasps, and Jess's cereal spoon pauses halfway to her mouth. Nick just finishes chewing, swallows, and yells "WINSTON!" Some of them have been here before.

They wait until Winston makes it out, leaning against the counter with a towel around his waist and drops of water still beading on his skin. "This better be good, Schimdt," Winston growls.

Schmidt beams confidently at all of them. "I have something very important to share with you. I have decided…" there's a long pause here, during which each of them gets a significant share of some intense one-on-one eye contact, "...that I will be choosing Elizabeth as my future girlfriend."

"Well this is gonna end well," Nick mutters, and sticks another spoonful of cereal in his mouth.

Jess puts her spoon down. "Are you kidding me, Schmidt," she says flatly.

"First question!" Schmidt exclaims, and points a finger at Jess. "I love the energy here. Let's get collaborative, let's get dirty, let's synergize this mother into the _ground_. I know you're worried, Jess, about the effect the loss of a prime masculine specimen such as myself on a woman like Cecelia. I admit, it's something that's been bothering me as well. But I think -"

"You can't just _choose_ who you're going to end up with, Schmidt," Jess interrupts, a little louder. "It doesn't work like that."

Schmidt frowns. "Everybody keeps telling me to make a choice. Ergo, I'm making a choice."

"Have you even _talked_ to Elizabeth since the wedding?"

Schmidt's mouth tightens. "I would," he says stiffly, "if she would answer her phone. What is this, the 1980s? Social networks are a real thing. Disrespect them at your peril."

"Next question," continues Jess, and sweeps an accusing finger around the room, "and this is for all of you: why was I not made aware of the couch condom stash before now?"

Schmidt turns to glare at Nick. "Nicholas, you know that box is emergency rations for unplanned sexual liaisons only."

"Don't make this about me! Jess should have been cut in from the beginning, Schmidt, and you know it."

Schmidt rolls his eyes. "Whatever. Current rate is one-fifty a month, Jessica, payable by the third or pre-payable on an annual basis. I'll need a signed contract by the end of the day."

"Excellent," Jess murmurs, and dives back in for another spoonful of cereal.

Winston raises his hand.

"Winston, yes, let's bring this back around. You have the floor, my brother."

"Well, first I would like to say: damn it, Schmidt, I was in the middle of a _very_ nice shower. Second: _You've_ been the one on lockdown for the past two months. Not Elizabeth." Winston's voice softens. "You might have lost your chance here. You have to be realistic."

"I refuse to acknowledge that possibility," Schmidt says, with a defiant and weirdly noble look.

"You know Winston's right, Schmidt," Jess says, unexpected kindness in her voice.

"Oh no, too bad, so sad, if only there was an entire field devoted to making people want things they didn't know they wanted. Oh wait, THERE IS."

Nick puts on his Rightfully Suspicious Of Whatever The Fuck Is Happening Here frown. "What are we talkin' about here, Schmidty?"

Schmidt slaps a hand down on the stack of papers on the kitchen counter and looms over all of them, grinning manically.

"Marketing, my man. _Marketing_."

\---

Things deteriorate from there into a pretty spectacular argument where Schmidt accuses each of them in turn of not understanding what he does for a living ("Something with ladies in pantsuits and spreadsheets?" Jess guesses, which is 100% accurate in Nick's opinion). Jess ends up running out in a panic, ten minutes late for work, after Winston finally makes good on his threat to _finish his shower, damn it_ and Nick gives up on saying anything at all and dives back into his bowl of cereal with the relish and discerning palate of a true gourmet.

Nick gets a terse text a couple minutes later about the lunch that Jess had accidentally left on the counter, and could he please run it by the school later?

Jess's school door is strewn with glittery construction paper flowers and a handwritten index card that says _Miss Day_ in the slot where a plastic name tag would slide in. He watches her for a moment through the thin arrow-slot window in the door. Her waist looks tiny in the bright purple dress she's wearing, like something he could wrap his hands around twice.

He knocks, rattling the thin pane of inset glass, and she lights up like the Chicago skyline at dusk.

"Hey," he mumbles, ducking his head to kiss her cheek and handing over the only slightly mashed up paper bag lunch.

Jess puts a hand on his elbow and turns him around, like he's her show-and-tell for the day. "Class, this is Mr. Miller."

Some kid in the back wolf-whistles. "Miss Day has a _boy_ friend."

"Ricky, knock it off," she snaps.

"Yeah, _Ricky_ ," he echoes, glaring at the kid with all the combined power of his adulthood and masculinity.

He levels his best stare at the entire classroom and tries not to think too much about how he can feel his back starting to prickle with sweat. Kids are freaky, that's all he's saying. Put a bunch of adolescent children in a group together and it's like Lord of the Flies meets Mad Max meets some show on the Disney Channel that confuses him in a way that also makes him fundamentally angry. Jess is the bravest person he knows for taking on this ragtag bunch of punks on a daily basis.

"Miss Day and Mr. Miller, sittin' in a tree…" The brat is fidgeting in his seat, like he can't believe how awesome he is for coming up with that.

"…K-I-S-S-I-N-G," a girl with a long, nosey face and a pink t-shirt picks up, giggling as she shoots Ricky a conspiratorial look from under her eyelashes that Nick is pretty sure is the middle-school equivalent of _come and get it, soldier_. Ricky looks confused now. If Nick had any room in his heart to feel sympathy for the kid, that would do it.

"I think your boyfriend's cute, Miss Day," a girl in the front row says, eyeing him thoughtfully while chomping down on gum and twirling a finger in her ponytail. Nick narrows his eyes suspiciously. He always ends up with the crazy ones.

Jess puts a hand on his shoulder. "Thank you, Becca. But I think Mr. Miller has to leave now. Isn't that right, Nick?" He's more than willing to take the hint and flee.

"Places to go, people to see, laws to sign," he confirms breezily, and shoots the class a pair of double-action finger pistols. Nick Miller, man of legend, freeze frame! No sweaty back here!

"Yeah you will," Jess mutters, fast and under her breath, glancing up at him coyly through thick eyelashes. It doesn't make sense at all and he's still totally, 110% into it.

Becca from the front row catches his eye and seductively blow a large pink bubble. It ends up popping all over her face in a messed-up pre-teen sexual metaphor for his life.

\---

"The teacher thing is hot," he points out, lounging on Jess's bed with one foot up in the air and various lengths of white craft string draped across the back of his neck.

"What?"

" _You_ , Jess. I'm saying you're hot, with the chalkboard and the giant desk and the scary wooden rulers."

Jess shakes her head and snips another string. "What is it with guys and being all up on lady teachers?"

"Not all lady teachers. _Hot_ lady teachers. Of which you, Jess, are one."

Jess shrugs. "I guess."

"You know you are. Don't try to pretend you don't know it, either."

Jess smiles at that, sly and kind of sideways, and hangs two shorter strings behind his right ear. He's festooned like a damn Christmas tree. He wouldn't be surprised if he ended this night with a star made out of pipe cleaner and glitter perched on his head.

He shakes his head experimentally, tossing the ends of string about.

"What's this all for, anyway?"

"Geometry." Jess sticks her tongue between her teeth as she squints through her thick glasses at the textbook on the bed beside her. She doubles up the length, cuts it with a metallic _snick_ , and drapes the new strings carefully around the back of his neck, like a queen anointing a knight.

He catches her hand and turns her palm over, pressing his lips against the white skin of her wrist. He touches the tip of his tongue against her pulse, on some sort of impulse. Jess sucks in air through her teeth. 

Nick clears his throat, then plucks out a single piece of string from the bunch looped over his ear. "You got nice hands," he says casually, and manipulates her wrist to rotate her hand back over. He ties the string around the base of Jess's pinkie in a sloppy bow.

When he looks up again, she's staring down at her hand with a weirdly blank expression.

"Forget me knot," he says, trying to make it sound a little more like a joke. "So you don't forget me." The silence is really a lot to take here.

Jess bites at her bottom lip, rolling the curve of it between her teeth. She's silent for a long moment. Then she reaches over to take his hand.

Her fingers are slim and graceful next to his giganto square-cut man paws. She cuts a new length of twine and ties the little white string carefully in a bow around his right pinkie finger, mirroring the one on her own hand, eyebrows drawn together and unexpectedly serious.

"Forget me not," she agrees in a quiet voice. She lifts his hand to her mouth to slowly kiss his knuckle, right above the tiny bow.

His heart is going fucking crazy now, thumping away underneath his ribs like it wants to vacate his chest and throw itself at her feet. Her lips are still on his knuckle. The corner of her mouth catches on the skin and sticks as she starts to pull away.

She finally lets his hand drop, color high on her cheekbones.

"Jess," he starts to say, and runs out of words, just like that.

She kisses him.

They make out for a while, necking like teenagers on a bed of white string. Nick's got an erection the size of the Empire State building, but it's kind of nice to ignore it for a while, to let the feelings build in the background, like drinking a beer on the beach while storm clouds fold in upon themselves in the distance.

\---

_Flagstaff, Arizona, 8 weeks earlier_

Arizona is flat and dry and boring.

They splurge on a hotel room just past the border so they can both shave, and make a pitstop in Flagstaff to get a check engine light checked out. Jess calls Winston and Schmidt to get cash wired for the mechanic, and while they're waiting for that to clear they find a restaurant in a dingy white brick building selling cheap tacos and beer.

They get drunk sitting on a picnic table outside, watching the highway in the distance and thin clouds build and dissipate on the horizon. Nick holds Jess's hand when he isn't taking a sip of his beer and wonders if there's a version of life with her that can always be like that - half-buzzed, laughing, the only two people sitting outside in the middle of a wide-open afternoon. His lips sting gently from the dry air. Jess keeps dropping his hand to point at something, or gesture wildly and animatedly as part of some story or explanation. He waits until she's done each time and reaches for her hand again.

They put the tailgate of Jess's car down that night and lay their blankets out flat in the back, sleeping with their feet hanging off the edge of the car, underneath the stars. They sleep with underwear on as a nod to common human decency, but Jess slips her hand down into his boxers at some point and then all bets are off. Nick's pretty sure he's going to end up addicted to the feel of her hands on his body, so he pays Jess back in full, as best as he can.

Jess says his name when she comes, dragging out the syllables, and Nick thinks it's the sweetest thing he's ever heard.

\---

Jess pads in on bare feet for breakfast the next morning, humming like there are little blue birds fluttering around her and baby animals trailing doe-eyed at her feet. She presses a sleepy kiss on Nick's cheek on her way to start the kettle for tea. Schmidt, propped up on a stool with his nose stuck in the newspaper and a foot on the rung beneath him, raises an eyebrow at Nick, who shrugs, 'cause who knows, man.

"Morning, Jess."

"Mmmhmm," she murmurs, and buries her nose in her tin of tea bags.

"Enjoying yourself?"

"Mmmhmm," she half-sings, and plucks out a brand with little orange curlicues and something about yoga on the wrapper. Her hair is pulled back in a messy bun this morning, rioting out of the rubber band, and her eyes are all dark and heavy with sleep.

Jess catches his eyes then, a small sort of dreamy smile at the corner of her lips, and it makes him realize he's been staring at her unabashedly the whole time she's been in the kitchen. She smiles at him for real then, uncomplicated and wide, and something _shifts_ inside of Nick, something large and complicated turns over in his chest. His heart starts to pound faster with a weird, sudden jolt of adrenaline, and Nick remembers the string thing from last night.

Because:

He had tied a ring on her finger.

A _ring_.

And then they made out. Without having sex. And it had been really intense and weirdly serious and super, super hot.

Schmidt looks like he wants to laugh at the two of them, a dimple of amusement pressed into the corner of his mouth. Nick's pretty sure the man is thinking some filthy things went down, because Jess looks like a woman who got it good last night and didn't just make out with her deadbeat boyfriend for a while, over clothes, like a teenager. Jesus. 

Winston pads in on bare feet, sweatpants dipping precariously low around his hips, and yawns his way to the fridge.

"I gotta get moved to the day shift," Winston says, rubbing his eyes. "This night shift stuff is bullshit."

"I hear ya, man, closing the bar is the worst."

"Do you think they'd let you?" Jess asks. "Work for a show during the day?"

Winston shrugs and grabs a paper carton of milk from the fridge. "Maybe."

"You should ask," Jess says. "The worst thing that can happen is they say no."

"Actually, Jess, the worst thing that could happen is that I lose my job."

Jess stirs some honey into her tea with a spoon. "I don't know. If being unemployed has taught me anything, it's that you have to go after what you want in life. I mean, Nick doesn't want to be a bartender his whole life, right? At some point you have to make your move, man."

Nick freezes.

Schmidt's smile slips on his face, and Winston's eyes slide over to Nick. Jess takes a unselfconscious sip of her tea and smiles happily at all of them.

"I think I gotta - hair style - what is -" Nick gasps, and stumbles his way backward out of the kitchen, heart beating fast.

\---

"What is _this_?"

Elizabeth slaps a piece of paper down on the bar and stares him down. Nick doesn't particularly _want_ to look, doesn't want to deal with any of this, but it's hard to ignore Schmidt's aggressively toothy mug grinning up at him with the words "SCHMIDT LOVES ELIZABETH" stamped underneath in bold. The only word Nick has been able to think of to describe this particular run of fliers is _intense_.

Elizabeth has a look on her face that Nick hasn't seen since college, a mulish tilt to her mouth. Elizabeth used to scare the hell out of him when she got a hold of something. But (and here's an important fact) Nick's not in college anymore. He's a _man_ now. He should be able to deal with Elizabeth as an equal.

So Nick mans the fuck up.

"I… don't know?" he tries, shrugging, then smiles fast to show that her attitude doesn't affect him, and then realizes it's really fucking weird he just smiled, so he pulls that down into a Serious Frown, and then his shoulder feels all itchy so he shakes his left arm out with something like a full body shudder.

Elizabeth narrows her eyes suspiciously.

Nick sighs, shoulders deflating. " _Fine_. Schmidt wants you back. If you haven't figured that out by now, I don't know what to tell you."

"Weirdly enough, I got that part."

"What's the problem, then?"

"The _problem_ , Nick, is that these are plastered all over my neighborhood." She clutches the poster again in her fist and waves at under his nose. "I don't understand what he thinks this is going to _do_."

Nick presses his lips together. "Look, you gotta understand something. Schmidt -"

Which is when he spots Jess at the door, hand on her purse and squinting as she looks around the bar.

Nick drops flat to the ground, like a trap door went out from under him. Elizabeth leans over the bar to look down at him. "Uh, what is this?"

Nick makes a couple of urgent shut-it-down, shut-it-down motions with his hand.

"Elizabeth!" He can hear Jess's voice now, friendly but polite. Nick crouches a little lower and crab-steps closer to the bar, huddling in on himself.

"Hey Jess," Elizabeth says, straightening back up. "What's up?"

Nick hears a thump that he's pretty sure is Jess throwing her purse down on the counter, which means she's right above him. Shit.

"Not much. I'm looking for Nick - have you seen him around?"

There's the soft clinking of glass, and then, "Nope." Cool as a cucumber, smooth as you please. Nick could _kiss_ Elizabeth right now.

"Oh." Jess sounds disappointed. Nick winces, closes his eyes, and wonders what the hell he's doing. What _is_ he doing? How does this make any sense? "Okay. I thought he was working tonight. But I must have -" There's a moment of silence. "…Is that the creepy poster Schmidt made for you? Are you _carrying it around_?"

Fuck.

There's a pregnant pause, and a couple tense seconds later Nick is looking up into a faceful of curly dark hair and Jess looming over him, nostrils flared and wide from this angle.

"Heeeeeeeeey," he says, brushes a speck of invisible something from his shoe, and stands back up. He winces a smile in Jess's direction. "What a wonderful surprise to see you, my beautiful girlfriend, in this fine establishment."

"Were you _hiding_ from me?" Jess sounds incredulous. There's a thin note of anger in her voice.

"Are you really surprised?" Elizabeth asks, with something like bitterness. "It's their move, both of them. They _hide_."

\---

_Syracuse, 12 years earlier_

"Elizabeth is coming, Elizabeth is coming. I can't talk to her right now. Stall her," Schmidt gasps, and turns to shut himself up in the closet.

A few minutes later, when Elizabeth sticks her head in the door, Nick panics, screams his best and highest pitch scream, and runs out of the dorm room like he's playing a very uncoordinated game of panic pinball, careening wildly until he fights his way out to freedom.

\---

Nick holds up a placating hand. "To be fair, there is a really interesting bit of… there was… oh my God, what's _that_?" he yells, and points at the back corner of the bar near the jukebox, but neither of them even turns their head. Kids today are so damn _skeptical_.

"What is up with you, Nick?" Jess asks, a little softer, and he winces.

"I… I'm…" he starts, and then the words get all huge and tangled in his mouth and he realizes he has no idea what to say. He grabs the bar towel and starts to wipe down a perfectly clean glass. He scowls to show that was his plan all along.

Jess stares at him, lips flat. She's wearing her teacher clothes, a bright red skirt and a thick belt around her waist, with those intimidating glasses.

"I have to work, Jessica," he says finally. "This is my _job_."

"I know it's your job. And two people can play at the first name game, _Nicholas_."

"Look," Elizabeth says, "I don't know what this is, and I don't want to. Can somebody just explain to me what the hell is going on with Schmidt, so I can get out of this bar and on with my life?"

Jess turns toward Elizabeth. "Schmidt _likes_ you. You know that. Look, do you want him back or not?"

Elizabeth hesitates, her mouth softening, and Nick feels a stab of pity for her. She had covered for him, after all. They're basically bros. "No," Elizabeth says finally, and only a tinge of sad finality keeps the word from sounding like a question. "He had his chance."

"Okay, well, you haven't told _him_ that, sister. Schmidt doesn't understand that dumb stunts like this aren't going to work. Just pick up the phone, tell him no, and get on with your life. And don't cover for _this_ guy." Jess stabs a finger in his direction without looking at him, like it's the final act of Law and Order and she's about to lay some sweet, sweet justice down on one Nick Miller, pseudo-esquire. Nick can feel the sweat starting to bead on his back. He shifts uncomfortably.

Elizabeth narrows her eyes at Jess. "I know Nick one hell of a lot better than I know you, lady."

"It doesn't change the fact that everything I said is true. And _you_." Jess turns back toward Nick. "What the hell, dude."

"Tropical bird!" he gasps, pointing at the back of the bar again. Second time the charm, suckers!

Nick runs away and locks himself in the men's bathroom.

\---

Nick can't sleep that night, or the night after. Jess has retreated to her own bedroom, so he's back to sleeping alone again, sprawled out in sheets that still smell like her girly shampoo. Nick works double shifts to kill the time, dealing with belligerent drunk people and vomit and dishwashing until he wants to scream. People are the worst, the actual _worst_.

He gets into a drinking contest at the bar late Sunday evening with this punk chick with pierced cartilage and an infectious grin who seems to think she's straight out of Indiana Jones with the hardcore drinking games. Earring Girl proves to have not been blowing smoke up his ass when she levels him, unceremoniously and to the cheering of half the bar, many, _many_ shots of vodka later. It's how his entire life is going right now, so. No big shocker there.

Big Bob gets him home that night, handing him off to Schmidt and Winston in the hallway outside the loft. Nick buries his head in Winston's neck as the three of them perform a five-legged stumble to the couch.

Nick falls asleep for a while and wakes to darkness and the mop bucket on the floor by his head. Schmidt's stretched out on the couch next to him, skinny legs propped up on the coffee table and scowling at an infomercial starring a woman who can't figure out how refrigerator doors work. Which is dumb. Even _Nick_ can do that.

"'Sup," Nick asks, but his mouth gets stuck on the 'p' sound and he ends up drawing it out. Suuuuuppppppppppp. He rounds off the whole thing with a satisfying popping noise, pursing his lips like he's about to go to town on the entire universe, tongue-style.

"Water," Schmidt orders, without taking his eyes off the TV, and nods at one of Jess's tea mugs on the table.

Nick rearranges the long limbs of his body, an operation with the slow moving thrills of sloth relocation, and manages to get himself in a spot where he can grab at the mug. The water is lukewarm from sitting out, but it's the best and sweetest thing Nick can imagine right now. He hadn't realized how dry the back of his throat was.

He stares down at his hands once the water's gone. Jess's mug is white, with little cartoon cats on the side and some smudges like poorly rendered hearts.

"Where's Jess?"

"In her room. She came home while you were out."

Nick nods dumbly, and stares a little harder at the mug. The cats look so _happy_ , cavorting in little jumps and pouncing on the occasional smudge/heart shape. Hot tears start to build behind his eyes, a messy emotion bubbling up from the alcohol and the whole thing with Jess. He grits his teeth, pulls back his lips, and blinks rapidly.

Schmidt sighs and mutes the television, where the infomercial has progressed to a over-the-top dissertation on the dangers of doors everywhere. "You gonna make it, man? If you're gonna hurl, aim for the bucket."

"She just left me." Nick's throat feels all tight and closed-up, like there's an itch he can't scratch all along his windpipe. "Left me on the couch, by myself."

"Hel _lo_." Schmidt gestures at himself. "Schmidt here. And I'm the one who told her to get some sleep. Girl has work in the morning."

"Of course she does," Nick mutters.

"Yes, she does," Schmidt agrees. "What's going on with you guys, anyway?"

Nick presses his lips together hard, compressing them until he can feel them start to tingle and go numb.

"What is your face, an _emoticon_? Fine. Whatever, man."

Schmidt un-mutes the infomercial and they sit together on the couch while the room spins gently underneath Nick's feet, like the two of them are at the center of a giant merry-go-round of sadness. Doors, doors, doors, doors are hard. Nick smacks his lips together, testing the gumminess of dry lips.

Schmidt shifts on the couch next to him.

"I talked to Elizabeth today," Schmidt says finally.

Nick blinks his eyes, and his eyelids move in suuuuper slow motion.

"Yeah?"

Schmidt nods, his eyes still trained carefully on the TV in front of them. "Yeah."

Schmidt doesn't say anything else, which really says everything that needs to be said on the subject. Nick heaves an arm up to clamp it around Schmidt's shoulders in a gesture of solidarity, brother to brother.

"You doin' okay, man?"

Schmidt shrugs.

"All right," Nick says, and rolls himself a little closer to Schmidt. "Hugs, not drugs. I'm doing this for you, Schmidty. You better appreciate it."

Nick flops his body on top of Schmidt's and hangs on for dear life, which is the best sort of hug he can manage right now.

"Nicholas, I didn't know you cared," Schmidt says in a choked-up voice, and slaps Nick once or twice on the back.

"Of course I care, man," Nick says. They're still hugging, though. It's starting to get weird. "You gotta let me go," Nick whispers into Schmidt's shirt, which a distant part of his brain notices smells _amazing_. Like manhood and pine forests. He really needs to ask Schmidt what the secret to that is.

They're quiet for a few more minutes after that. The infomercial ends, and launches into a late-night community talk show hosted by an old lady with square librarian glasses and unsexy puckered lips. She's like an older, pissed-off version of Jess. Nick's not exactly sure what the woman's on about, but he senses through the dim buzz of words that she's upset about _something_.

"I think Jess and I might break up," Nick says finally. The words hang strangely in the air after he says them, like it takes a couple seconds for the sound waves to make it to his ears. It makes Nick feel all weird and hollow.

"What? Why? Did she say that?"

"No. But… c'mon. I'm not an idiot. Jess and I… we're… it just was never gonna last." Nick scrunches up his whole face. "Ya know?"

Schmidt snorts. "What I see is you psyching yourself out. Jess likes you, man. If you're too much of a dumb schmuck to see that, that's on you, not her."

Nick shakes his head, and the motion jumbles up his thoughts, all of it slopping around messily in his head. "She's just…"

"Let's be real here, Nicholas, if she wanted real sexual satisfaction, I'm the one in the loft she would have turned to."

"That is… not at all accurate. But weirdly comforting."

Schmidt inclines his head, and flips the channel to late-night ESPN.

"Sorry about you and Elizabeth," Nick says, after the baseball scores.

"I'm sorry about you and Jess," Schmidt says.

\---

_San Bernardino, California, 12 weeks earlier_

"What about this?" Jess shoves a fistful of pink tutu in his direction, the netted fabric a riot of fluff and girly color.

Nick considers the pink fabric dripping from her hands with the cautiously fearful respect he gives live raccoons in the dumpster, or porcelain dolls. "I don't know? I feel like a unicorn just blew chunks and then those chunks somehow also became a skirt for girls."

"Couldn't have said it better myself, my man," Jess agrees, and pulls the tutu up over her now-tattered blue sari to give it a proper twirl.

Nick pulls out a plaid shirt from the rack. 50 cents, with all the buttons: master of the deal, king of the thrift rack!

"What about this?" He holds the shirt up against his body, pursing his lips, and throws in his best Blue Steel for no extra charge.

Jess squints at him and grins, goofily fond, for no particular reason he can tell. "It looks like something you already own."

"Sold," he says, and throws it down on the rapidly growing pile of clothing at their feet.

Jess browses idly through the housewares section with the tutu on, frowning at the piles of sad beige appliances and chipped brown dishware from the 70s. She pulls out a giant silver fork and holds it in front of her face to examine it, like she's the freaking little mermaid trying to puzzle out human civilization from a single kitchen utensil. "Do you think we need dishes? Like, plates and silverware and stuff?"

"What, are we throwing a fancy party? Dishes are for people who don't want to get their hands dirty."

Jess's frown deepens, and she twirls the giant fork in front of her face. 

Nick reconsiders. "Maybe cups. Hey, do you think they have a socket wrench set somewhere around here?"

They throw everything in the trunk and head up over the low mountains, shedding people and cars and civilization as they drive. Nick wants to scream into the emptiness of it all, wants to stand on a mountaintop with Jess in a metal bikini sprawled out underneath him and dare the world to COME AT HIM, BRO. He tells that to Jess, expecting her to laugh, but instead she gets a scarily manic glint in her eye and peels them off the highway onto a shady looking dirt road.

"C'mon," she says, goading him on, after the road ends and they're standing on a dirt overhang overlooking the valley below them. "Do it, Nick. You know you want to."

\---

One of Cece's model friends is leaning against the kitchen counter when he wakes up the next morning, slouching seductively and shoveling yogurt into her mouth with a blank look of disdain.

"Nadia, do you think you can --" Cece runs into the kitchen towing a fistful of balloons after her, and Nick has a sudden, vague memory of Jess explaining something to him a couple days ago about Sadie's after-the-baby baby shower, which must be… today?

Nick rakes a hand back through his hair, which is sticking up all over the place. "Morning, Cece."

"No," Nadia says flatly, then nods at him. "Old man."

"Nick." Cece is eyeing him up and down, which makes Nick fidget and readjust his boxers reflexively, but Cece jumps straight past the rocking body he's sporting to the skills section of his resume. "You're handy, right?"

Nick laughs scornfully. "Uh, I'm going to assume we _all_ know the answer to that one."

"Look," Cece says, sounding pretty stressed out, "Jess left this giant banner that I'm supposed to hang up while she's out picking up the party favors, and I can't hold it up and hang it at the same time. Do you think you could -"

Nick clears his throat. "Uh, yeah. Sure. No problem."

They hang the banner in silence, Nadia on the sidelines working the supervision role for all she's worth. The banner says "OH BABY OH BABY" and has smiling stick figures of two ladies hanging out with a stork in a top hat and bow tie. Nick keeps sneaking glances at Cece, who finally sighs and faces him down.

"Okay, out with it."

"I'm not -"

"I'm not going to bite your head off, you know."

Nick shifts his hammer from hand to hand, frowning. "How's Jess doing?"

"You know that's a question you should ask her yourself."

Nick winces, and Cece sighs.

"Just… trust me, Nick. Talk to Jess. You won't be sorry. Be the bigger man here."

Nadia snorts. "Bigger than little Jew man is easy."

" _Nadia_ ," Cece snaps, and throws a tight, apologetic smile in Nick's direction.

"It's cool," Nick says, and sticks the ends of a couple nails in his mouth.

\---

Nick assumes the lesbian baby shower is a success, if the cheerful mess in the apartment is any indication by the time he makes it home that evening. He spends a good half hour alternating between staring at his own door and Jess's, runs his hands through his hair for the five millionth time, closes his eyes, opens them again, wipes his hand across his forehead, before finally, this time - _this_ time - managing to knock on Jess's door.

She yells for him to come in, and Nick opens the door cautiously. He hasn't been in here since The Weirdness started going down, when Jess's room had changed from being a place Nick hung out in and occasionally had sex in back to the inner sanctum of Jess-dom. Jess is surrounded by laundry in the middle of her bed, not looking at the door. She's folding a shirt, holding the collar under her chin and crossing the arms.

Nick clears his throat. "Hey, Jess."

"Oh. Hey, Nick." 

And then there's the awkward silence.

It occurs to him after a moment that Jess looks… scared? Her eyes are wide, like a magical anime princess thing, and her whole body is tensed up like she's ready to bolt. She's frozen in place, laundry in her lap, and just _staring_ at him, her eyes the bluest of the pretty blues.

"So, I've been a real dumbass." Jess's shoulders deflate by a fraction of an inch, the tiniest bit of the tension bleeding from her body. "And I wanted to say I'm sorry. It was stupid. I'm a grown ass man." Damn, what is he supposed to say here? "So this is me, trying to act like a grown ass man."

She bites her lip, still staring at him, long enough that Nick can feel his nervousness start to balloon back out into panic. He tries to clamp it down, imagining himself a hundred feet tall, stomping around his psyche like Godzilla. It sort of works.

"You better come in," she says finally. "And close the door."

Being in Jess's room with the door closed feels illicit, like it's high school all over again and he's about to get to second base, hands on and/or under a girl's bra, with the fear of parental authority breathing down his neck. He pulls out the chair from Jess's desk and turns it around backward to straddle it, so they can rap this one out, 90s style.

"Okay," she says. "Okay. You just have to tell me what's going on inside your head, Nick. That's all you have to do."

He tries to laugh, but it comes out kind of choked sounding. "You make it sound so simple."

She raises her eyebrows.

"Uh. Right. So." Nick swallows. "You and me, getting away from here, getting away from everything, it was --" Nick takes a sharp breath in. "It was incredible. It was like a dream. But that isn't real life. And in real life, I'm not -- I'm a dropout who isn't sure he wants to do more than bartend his whole life. What's a girl like you want with somebody like _me_? How do we possibly make sense?"

Jess is shaking her head now, _no_ , shaking it faster and faster. "So you… what? You decided you were just gonna stop talking to me, until I broke up with you?"

"Maybe," he mutters defiantly, 'cause when she puts it like that, it sounds pretty dumb.

"But I don't care about that - any of that stuff you just mentioned," Jess says. She sounds hurt now, and confused. "Why would you think I care about that?"

"I don't know!" he says, balling his hands up into fists.

"I was the one who uncalled it, Nick. I don't know how you could even think that I don't want --"

"I don't think that!" he interrupts loudly. "I think you're attracted to me, and I think you like living here, and I'm your best option!"

That stops her cold. She slams her mouth shut, breathing hard.

"You treat me like a child sometimes, Jess. You know you do. I'm _your_ pogo."

"You're not --"

"Look. I thought --" Nick shrugs, uncomfortably. "I don't know what I thought. But it was always going to end like this, Jess. You know it was."

"I do not know that!" she snaps. She breathes in hard through her nose. "Look. I -- Can we… Can I talk to the Nick Miller from six months ago?'"

"What?"

Jess throws her shoulders back and repeats, "I want to talk to my friend. Nick Miller. Past Nick. I want to talk to that guy right now."

Nick stares at her blankly. "Are you talking… about time travel?"

"Yes," Jess confirms. "I _am_ talking about time travel, Nick." She opens her eyes up wide. "Using the power of your _imagination_."

"...I feel like I'm going to regret this."

"Is that a yes?"

"It's not a no," Nick mutters.

Jess nods at him, then passes a hand in front of her face like a mime, emerging on the other side with a thoughtful expression. "Hello, Past Nick."

Nick gives Jess a once-over, because if he knows anything about himself in the past, it's that he'd be way down for a future in which he'd been able to do _that_ to Jess. "What up, baby."

Jess frowns, shaking her head. "No, Past Nick doesn't talk like that. You need to take this seriously, Nick."

"I am taking this seriously, Future Jess. And you're wrong, by the way. Past Nick would have been all over you."

"No, he wouldn't. I _know_ Past Nick. You're doing this all wrong, Nick."

"Trust me, Jess. Past Nick had it pretty bad for you. He was just good at hiding it."

Jess smiles for the first time since this whole mess started to go down, small and tentative. "You know, I never… I don't really think about that."

This whole conversation annoys him suddenly. "Yeah, well. It doesn't matter anyway. What do you want, Future Jess?"

Jess straightens back up. "I just… I need some advice, Past Nick. And since you're my best friend, and you always give me the best advice, I thought you could help me. I'm dating this guy. And we've only been going out for a couple months, but I really like him, Past Nick. He's always there for me when I need him, and he… he makes me care about stuff. And he's a tiger in the sack too, boy howdy. _Rawr_ , am I right?" Jess scratches at the air in front of her and pouts a little, which really shouldn't be as hot as it is. "But he doesn't think I like him enough. I don't know what to do, Past Nick. Can you help me?"

Nick tries, he _tries_ to take this seriously. "I don't know, Future Jess. Have you told him how you feel?"

Jess starts to nod, and hesitates. "I'm… not sure. I have, but maybe he hasn't noticed."

"Well, maybe it's not on you. Maybe this guy needs to man up and be the one to tell you first."

She nods. "I think I should tell you that he's assured me he is a grown ass man."

"Jess, one thing you gotta learn about guys: any explanation that starts with 'I'm a grown ass man' automatically negates anything that comes after it. Null and void, warranty broken."

Jess gets a funny sort of look in her eye. "I love it when you talk lawyer to me."

"Subpoena," Nick tries out. "Circumstantial evidence."

Jess shivers.

"See, that's what I mean! I'm not a lawyer, Jess. I'm a bartender. And I _like_ being a bartender." Nick squints at something just past Jess's shoulder and curls up the corner of his lip. "…Sometimes."

"Okay, fine. Talk bartender to me, then. Bring it, Miller."

Nick drops his voice down low. "Tincture. Absinthe."

"Heavens," Jess says and fans herself.

" _Angostura bitters_ ," Nick says, narrowing his eyes.

"See? Still hot."

"I don't know. Future Jess has a lot of kinks that I wasn't aware Past Jess was into."

Jess presses her lips together. "This isn't going to work if you can't even believe the things I tell you. You have to have a little faith in me, Nick. Just a little." She holds her fingers an inch apart.

"What would you have done if Past Nick had made a move on you?" Nick asks suddenly.

"What?"

"You heard me."

She blinks. "But Past Nick did make a move on me. And I kissed him back, Future Nick." Jess smiles. "And then I ran away with him into the desert."

Nick swallows, something large and overwhelming stuck in his throat.

"Look, can we… start over?" Jess asks, looking painfully and warily tense again. "Can we just start over from now, from living in the loft? Like this?"

Nick doesn't trust himself to talk, so he nods, these intense feelings chasing each other through his veins, making him tongue-tied. He can't stand the distance between the two of them, so he stands up and holds a hand out to Jess. She takes his hand carefully. He pulls her into a hug and closes his eyes, digging his nose into her hair, Jess up on her tiptoes with her arms around his waist.

"Yeah," he finally manages to say, voice muffled in her neck. "Okay. Let's do that."

\---

Schmidt cajoles Nick into making an alcohol run with him that weekend to pick out _only the dirtiest of the hipster beers, my friend_ , along with a generous smattering of various liquors and a bottle of cheap red for Jess, which Nick figures out quickly is lubrication for a rooftop game of Shots, Truth, or Dare.

"Dare," Jess says, after a couple rounds. Her eyes are bright with alcohol and the glitter of white Christmas lights, strung over their heads.

"Kiss somebody here," Schmidt says, after a thoughtful period of deliberation, sprawling back in the throne of the King of Wildcards. "Lady's choice."

Nick cracks his knuckles and stretches his arms up. Boyfriend action, right here! Jess glances over at him. She smiles then, and starts to move in his direction. She goes on her hands in front of him, palm flat on the ground. The view is pretty fantastic, her shirt low cut and her boobs making the most of it. Jess has the _best_ bras. Her hip dips seductively as she crawls a step towards him. She doesn't break eye contact with him.

Nick's throat goes dry.

Then she swerves and kisses Winston ( _Winston_ ), smack dab on the mouth.

Winston goes very still as Schmidt starts to laugh and whoop in the background. Jess kisses Winston carefully, just their lips touching, but it's a split second longer than Nick's maybe gonna admit that he's comfortable with.

Jess starts to laugh when she pulls away from Winston, color high on her cheeks and soft with something like embarrassment. Winston works his jaw for a moment and shoots a glance at Nick, who raises his eyebrows.

"Damn, girl," Winston says then, "you coulda just _told_ me."

Schmidt bumps his shoulder cheerfully into Jess as she sits back down, and she giggles, relaxed and confident. Nick feels a weird rush of warmth in his heart, like his body is one of those mood rings and the color is lit up all red and yellow and orange, and he thinks, _I love these idiots_.

Nick punches Winston on the shoulder anyway, for form's sake.

"My boy's got himself _mad_ game," Schmidt crows, like this whole scenario where his best friend's girl gets it on with his _other_ best friend is somehow a credit to him. "Like bees to the flower, they are."

"Your turn, Schmidty," Nick says.

"Truth," Schmidt says promptly, riding high on a wave of personal triumph.

Nick takes a slug of his beer. "First year of college. Seven Minutes in Heaven. Mary Beth Chester. Do you really…?"

"Hells _yes_ , son. Second base, first stop, boob city, with a layover in nipple play junction. All _aboard_."

Nick leans a little closer. "... _Really_?"

Schmidt shoots a glance at Winston, who has his eyebrows raised and isn't even trying to hide his interest in the question.

"Maybe not… exactly."

"Ah ha!" Nick exclaims, and jabs a finger at the air. "I knew it!"

Schmidt ducks his head, weirdly bashful for a split second, and Nick sees that overlay of the Schmidt he used to know, the mannerisms of the big-hearted dude he roomed with for years lurking beneath of the surface of this brash, skinny guy. "…It's not a big deal."

"Wait, what's this?" Jess asks, looking back and forth between them.

"Okay, so freshman year, we were at some party - this frat social thing, you know, so the frats can figure who's cool and not cool - and old Schmidty here gets bundled off to the laundry room with _Mary Beth Chester_ for a round of Seven Minutes in Heaven."

"Mary Beth Chester," Winston adds, "you have to understand, was a _fox_. I didn't even go to Syracuse and I knew how hot she was."

"Oh, _that_ Mary Beth Chester," Jess says, and snort-laughs into her glass of wine.

"And then all I hear about for the next year is Schmidt getting it on with M.B. All. The Freaking. Time." Nick narrows his eyes and gives Schmidt his best Pepperwood. "But I always felt like there was more to the story."

Schmidt shrugs, looking uncomfortable. "We both agreed to lie about it. She'd never even kissed a guy before, and I… we were both pretty freaked out."

"Aww, that's sweet," Jess says, and lays her hand on top of Schmidt's.

Schmidt starts to grin. "Yeah, Nicholas. It was _sweet_."

"Don't validate this man, Jessica. It was not sweet. It was a dirty lie that has been rubbed in my face for _years_."

"Gotta go with Nick on this one, Jess," Winston says.

Schmidt coughs loudly. " _Winston_. Shots, Truth, or Dare, my man."

Winston takes a deep breath and screams "SHOTS," and they all yell and run toward the scattered shots stations around on the roof. Nick makes it to the tequila slammers station before Schmidt, elbowing him ruthlessly out of the way, who scampers off to fight it out with Winston for the honor of the slippery nipple table. Jess is mixing up something blue and purple and scientific looking on the other side of the roof, and she slams it back with only a slight wince. Nick downs his tequila slammer with practiced panache, and makes it back to their little circle of rooftop chairs first, claiming the game throne from Schmidt, marked by a beach towel slung over the back.

"Damn it," Schmidt grouses, limping back from his exile at the far away Make Your Own Masterpiece table, littered with everything left over from the fridge Jess could scrounge up. "Sometimes I think the professional advantage Nick holds over us in this game is unfair. And I think I just drank something with pickle juice."

"Don't make me invoke the Blue Bird of Sadness on you," Nick warns. "You know I'll do it, Schmidt."

"I like it when you get all bossy," Jess says with a sly little grin, and Schmidt scowls.

\---

They break up the party after midnight, when the night air cools down enough that Jess starts shivering and leaning into Nick's side. Winston stumbles a little coming down the stairwell, but Schmidt catches him with an arm around his waist and then Jess wraps her arm around Winston's other side, and Nick leads them all down the stairs, Jess's hand on the back of his shoulder. Schmidt kisses Jess's cheek at her door with this little flourish of formality, and then Winston laughs and kisses Jess's other cheek. Nick scowls and gives both of them the stink eye for all the kissing, because what are they, brother-husbands? That's right, they are not.

Nick follows Jess into her room. She's already undressing, pulling her shirt up over her head, exposing the long, white line of her back. She kicks off her skirt into the closet, bending a little to work it down past her hips, accentuating the broad curve of her ass.

She turns back to him, in one of those bras that hoists everything up a good couple inches and a mostly-matching pair of panties. She looks voluptuous and apple-cheeked, like a pin-up girl in some old time girlie calendar.

"Hey Nick, truth or dare."

Nick takes a step in close to Jess and rests his hands on her hips, just above the elastic line of her panties. He takes a deep breath, and just says it. "Truth."

"What are you thinking about, Nick?" she asks.

"You, Jess," he says. "I'm always thinking about you."

\---

_Los Angeles, California, 3 months earlier_

They drive through the night, swerving recklessly across empty lanes on the wide-open LA highways. Jess turns the radio up loud and sings along to a bunch of pop songs, kicking her heels in her blue sari, that make Nick want to grind his teeth to drown out the noise. He ends up accidentally unearthing a ukulele in the backseat of her car ("I was wondering where Mr. Jingle-Go-Lightly was!" Jess exclaims, and Nick decides to just let that one _go_ ) and convinces her to turn the radio off by painstakingly picking out the notes of the greatest hits of the 90s and some classic rock using only his college-era guitar skills and his keen sense of superior musical taste.

They're deep into a weirdly good rendition of Stairway to Heaven, Jess's throaty alto sinking the low notes and him on backup humming an only slightly out-of-tune countermelody, the ukulele plinking out the delicate background notes, when they reach the city line.

The road stretches out long and black in front of them, dissolving into the darkness. Jess reaches over to grab at his hand, searching by touch for his fingers.

He uncurls her fingers carefully and kisses the palm of her hand, once.

She smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/59883176473/my-het-little-big-bang-fic) on tumblr!


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